Back in my undergrad days I was involved in student politics. I sat in the student parliament and also observed the Senate meetings. My election campaign was very clear that we were running on a socialist ticket, we were up front about that. I got rather disillissioned with alot of the student politics though, most of the participants struck me as being in it for opportunist reasons, that it would look good on their resumes, or serve as a spring board for formal party politics. Very few were legitimately interested in defending student rights and issues, although they certainly had to give the superficial impression of such for electoralm purposes. I declined to get involved in student politics here in Edinburgh partly due to that impression and because I thought I would be better off investing my energies into academic work and building new social movements.

The thing is I have no problem with the Conservatives or any other political formation campaigning for student political office, I think thats great. But I have a distinct distaste for such tricks as mentioned in this article. Its just totally dishonest and creepy. I don’t know what reaction this is going to have in Canadian politics, but I would hope it would make people even less trustworthy of the Conservatives, and with any luck this will crush what little support they may have had in the student movement. I mean, its important to have their voice there, but they deserve to be treated with contempt and suspicion after this.

The most telling thing for me was the comment in the article where it mentioned how Liberals can be the Tories biggest allies in their plots. How true. Its really hard to tell the difference between the two within the Canadian context these days.

I think the point is that the NDP wouldn’t launch a stealth campaign like this. The NDP may be alot of things which I have problems with, but at least they are up front on issues like this. either that or they are really good at the stealth tactics!

I think the point is that the NDP wouldn’t launch a stealth campaign like this.

No – they wouldn’t launch a stealth campaign. The Ryerson paper would never have called it a stealth campaign. They’d just refer to the whole thing as a campaign strategy meeting and argue that discussing ways to increase the Party’s representation on various committees was a good thing.